The harvest of 1887 was the best Manitoba had ever known--the most abundant, indeed, until the phenomenal crop of 1915. The C.P.R. had twelve million bushels of grain to haul to Port Arthur, and the task staggered the equipment resources of what was even then regarded as an enormous railway system. Fields that were estimated to yield twenty-five bushels to the acre, threshed out forty and more. Ideal weather had come just at the time the heads were filling; and instead of some rows not amounting to anything, as often happens when milk in the ear is scarce and development is hindered by hot sun and dry winds, every husk contained its berry. This 1887 crop, of magnificent quality, sold in Brandon at from forty-eight to fifty-one cents a bushel. It was a common saying among the farmers that a good European war was needed to make Manitoba wheat worth something--perhaps two dollars a bushel might be obtained at some impossible time. The big European war did come, and wheat did go to two dollars a bushel--far higher, in fact. But there was not so much rejoicing as seemed possible in the eighties; for the other unthinkable thing had happened, and Manitoba farm boys were being slain in the European war that made Canadian wheat so dear. During the summer and harvest of 1887 the Dominion Government agents had tried to buy Charlie Stewart’s farm. He didn’t want to sell; for the place was handy to town; his old mother was well settled with him; and there were advantages in being so near Brandon. On the other side, the Government wanted so ideal a place, and the situation was something of Ahab and Naboth’s vineyard over again, but with no Jezebel intervening. One day in the early winter Charlie Stewart was horse-power threshing at Dan MacMillan’s, up the valley, close to where the Little Saskatchewan enters the Assiniboine--perfectly level fields, good soil, and flanked by what was left of the original bush, in which were scores and scores of stumps the trunks of which had been cut down and taken away by the beaver, remains of whose houses were still among the brush. To the outfit a Government agent drove. Charlie Stewart left the stack, and after about ten minutes returned, the agent driving away. When he was a couple of hundred yards off, Stewart began to blaspheme as mildly as he knew how, with regret that he had sold his farm. Impetuosity was nothing new to Charlie Stewart, as one of his mares, circling with the horse-power gear below him, silently testified. She was a big, dark-grey Percheron, foaled on the present Experimental Farm. When she was a few weeks old, and while Charlie was plowing with her mother, she got out of the yard, and came over to impede the breaking, as fillies desiring nourishment will. Failing to drive her off, Charlie pulled her back to the stable by the ears--and her ears never pricked again.